Short Story about Dreams of Transformative Mutilations

 

Dazzle - a short story about love, mutilation, transformation, and manifesting nightmares 

Anthony Bunting:

As far back as his memories could go, Anthony recalled spending most of his days on this earth experiencing great bouts of increasingly terrible dreams. In rare moments of total lucidity, he could trace these memories back and realize that his life, or the memory of his life that he was able to piece back together amongst the layers of thickening fog engulfing his brain, had few moments free of these dreams. Not that these were always dreams in the traditional sense. Not always simply a series of images and sequences of jumbled up and twisted subconscious manifestations, nor were they always traditional nightmares, cataloging his fears, trauma, and paranoia into a cataclysmic nighttime disturbance. They contained these elements, yes, but they were also frequently governed by a sort of malaise of thoughts and feelings that struck Anthony to a significantly grueling degree. These were all-encompassing, paralyzing dreams that would surge through him at any hour of the waking day as powerfully as they would grip him during his countless fitful nights. When they came on, it would feel as if a torrent of drum mallets made of barbed wire and bone began pounding on his membrane, or helicopter blades cutting through clouds of napalm burning up in his abdomen - and with it, all logic or semblance of reality would suddenly fall away. These were great dreams of becoming. Or dreams that were leading him on such a path. All sense of freedom or reason departed. 

A path, a nightmarish portent, to becoming something more than himself, becoming something that would allow him to finally take control, to finally become so far out of humanity to a degree that would allow Anthony to cease all caring and cease all that he once knew. No longer chained to this longstanding season of hell. His human level of consciousness thrown violently into a gnawing gap in space, and the hollow shell of himself that was left behind would soon be overwhelmed by what these dreams tell him and what these dreams show him in order to allow a transformation into something no longer resembling any semblance of humanity. Something far more ancient than anyone could trace back or imagine. This was what he felt during these fits following the phantasmagoric takeovers where any other possible intruding thought was impossible and perceiving the world around him in a rational, stable way was of paramount difficulty. And once it was over, either when he woke up or was unexpectedly dropped back into the ugly scintillating light of reality, his mind was left reeling with nearly every negative emotion and thought possible amplified to a frightening degree. What he was left with, the nagging urges and tumultuous unstable feelings that felt as if they were undoing the fragile sutures holding together his existence, were the exact feelings he was guided by in the dreams to get rid of. Or, perhaps, that is simply the sort of sense Anthony wanted to make of these incomprehensible bouts. Without the dream logic, without the possible delusion of having all of these horribly debilitating thoughts masticating at his already fragile will to keep going, then it would all be for nothing - and Anthony, quite simply, would know for sure that he wanted nothing more than to die. Somehow, perhaps paradoxically so, this condition of his has given him some extremely vague and wavery fight to survive. Maybe just to see these dreams to the very end, to see what they had in store for him. 

More importantly so, Anthony saw these dreams as a way to achieve what he has always wanted to achieve; to turn himself into something that would cease the feeling of total, abject isolation that has seemingly always had such a heavy prominence in his head. He wanted no one, but, conversely, desperately did not want to feel alone anymore. The only way, logically, to get there was to become something that falls out of our time - something that doesn’t feel what we feel - a pile of half-conscious human dregs torn away and salvaged hastily together to form something utterly unknown from previously recognizable parts. A universal anomaly, a rejected mockery, an uncanny other fit to belong nowhere and to nothing. He’d be torn apart, piecemeal sections of his few remaining identifiable human traits and features would be slapped back together in such a way that would grant him the privilege to lose any semblance of humanity in his new hyperphysical and abysmal form. The great uncanniness takes over and breathes through this new Frankenstein flesh. This was what the dream feelings seemed to confirm to him - this was, to Anthony, well worth seeking out how to achieve. 

And how exactly would Anthony accomplish this within himself? He simply didn’t have a clue. And the dreams that seemed to be trying to posit some sort of solution became steadily more vague and enigmatic with each passing visitation. And then there was the possibility Anthony knew in the far reaches of his mind but did not want to ever face; that these dreams never did or never will have any sort of actual meaning whatsoever. But then why him? Why become only more afflicted by these visions that, despite being increasingly vague, shared common flashes of images, locations, events, possible messages, and a throughline that has been present his entire remembered life? No. There had to be something to it all or else what would be the point? Besides, it was all so persistent and pervasive that hardly a single day of his life past a certain age would go by where he didn’t feel the ubiquitous urge to make some sort of dramatic escape from himself, from all of this. And the dreams seemed to reinforce this and guide in a purpose of planned self-destruction and transformation. He wanted nothing more than to submit to them, to give up control over himself, and be guided into a new territory of existence by any means necessary. 

-

There have been innumerable days, increasingly so as Anthony hesitantly lurched through his teenage years, where the lingering effect of the dreams created mornings heavy with an atmosphere of stifling fear and an overbearing revulsion to his own waking consciousness. Shaken awake into a fresh hell with no agency, no motivation, no driving force to make him continue on; nothing but a staggeringly strong urge to do away with himself. Some blinding maelstrom of negative impulses would manage to get him out of bed, shuffle to the bathroom, face the dimly lit mirror, hold his hand up by violently grabbing a fistful of his greasy long dark hair, and stare - trying with great difficulty, but ultimately failing, to recognize himself. 

Then a series of familiar images would begin to manifest and reveal themselves through the smudged glass. In the images, Anthony would begin shaving his head, thick rivulets of hair sailing down around his feet until he was close to bald. Then his eyebrows, which he always found to be offensively, distractingly bushy and much too dark. After that was taken care of, he would continue to stare at his now patchy bald head and the bleeding narrow fields of stubble above his eyes and would still fail to recognize himself.

The images in the mirror begin to shimmer, his phantom flesh dazzling, the blood where his eyebrows used to be swirling and spiraling upwards into the hazy light of the bathroom ceiling, like droplets of water reversing in time. Anthony’s new appearance would turn deathly bluish pale - as if all his blood was being siphoned out of him and into the great agonizing unknown careening above his head. Slowly, he was beginning to recognize himself. Without shifting his dulled eyes away from his fluctuating reflection, Anthony takes apart the shaving razor and takes up the blade to start slashing away at his now cleansed, hairless face. Sheets of his skin would fall away as the blood, draining of its color, left his increasingly cadaverous face, spilling up and swirling in a thick pale fog around the now shining, glimmering light of the bathroom. A halo of dazzling sparks, crimson hanging around his head like floating ornaments before escaping into the ceiling. If he were to look down now, Anthony would be greeted by chunks of flesh and dramatic splotches of blood covering his body and clogging the sink along with clumps of his discarded hair - but the transformative reflection with all its glitter and sparks and dreamy swirls of bleeding color was all that was in front of him as his gaze escaped fully into the mirror delusion. He could see what he wanted to be, forging himself a mask of patchwork lacerations to remove himself from humanity. 

During this process, it was imperative that none of these cuts, nor the combination of all of these cuts, along and across his face would not prove to be fatal. Anthony did not want to die from this exercise, he simply saw it as one of the possible methods to adhere to the dreams and become something new, something completely unrecognizable to himself and all those around him. And at this particular point in his life, he wanted to see and feel and smell his own blood in a desperate ploy to understand that he is actually human and can feel something towards himself. Once he could understand that, then he could more successfully undo his position as a human being, or at least that’s what he told himself. Anthony would go back out in the world, with his new mask of haphazardly crisscrossed open wounds and his corpse complexion, which would certainly do well to shock and disgust, and forge ahead living life in his new form. As the cuts would heal, if he didn’t come to deathly, horrible infection, the skin on his face and scalp would stretch and wrinkle in order to heal what has been lost - thus rewriting Anthony’s face once more. 

Sometimes the thought occurred to him that he should, after shaving his head, take the razor blade to the surface of his scalp and tear it apart as much as he could. That way, even his hair couldn’t grow back normally. And he wanted to envision himself, with his torn open head, with several rivulets of pale blood pouring down his cut-open face and escaping from one wound to the next, staining his mangled skin a strange palish red instead of the normal human color of deep dark reddish brown. Thus he faced the ultimate conclusion of these dreams; he would survive for the will of transformation and would be utterly and irrevocably disfigured to the point where he himself, and the rest of the unlucky lot of the human population who would encounter him, would deny him any definable role attributed to a classifiable human being. And it would be all in his total control. Pain, doubt, desire, feelings of isolation, despondency, and the wavering uncontrollable sickness that ravaged his brain would have no place within anymore as all of that would be much too human for what he would be turned into. This image of himself, disfigured and alien, would flicker like maddening static in the bathroom mirror for a brief while. And as Anthony stared wide-eyed and frozen at this new image of himself, he felt he finally could recognize who was behind that mockingly reflective pane of ugly glass. 

-

Of course, there were much easier ways for him to become disfigured. Anthony could very well just throw acid in his own face, start a controlled fire and leap head first into the flames, or simply shoot off part of his jaw. And he thought of all of these methods, dreamed them up, envisioned them in great detail, and carried these ideas with him throughout all waking hours of his days. Most days these thoughts came to him from an undying desire for a way out, and even a simple act of crossing the road presented him with easily obtainable possibilities. What would it really take to take one measly step forward into speeding oncoming traffic and either die, get twisted and mangled up in burning metal and engine oil or even just suffer enough injuries to lapse into a coma and spend the rest of his days lying beautifully unconscious in some decrepit public hospital? Surely any of these methods would serve to alleviate some aspects of recognizable humanity from him. But the trouble was that, to Anthony, none of these more tried and true methods were as dramatic and, let’s say, “unique” as his more elaborate scheme of self-mutilation. A dream of severing himself from himself, to channel all of these agitating, boiling, inundating feelings of intense self-hatred and existential bewilderment into a final act of oblivion. And did Anthony ever properly act on these feelings? Did he ever successfully transform himself and shred away at the flesh he felt wasn’t supposed to be draped upon his thinning bones any longer? To his continued dismay, no. Anthony never had the ability to go this far - and often times all of these feelings raged so violently inside of him for so long that any and all human emotion, motivation, or call-to-action, would be atrophied and eroded, replaced by a great, overwhelming cloud of total, abject apathy. 

All that anger, the self-hatred, the profound desire to mutilate himself, to rapidly decay, to rid himself of consciousness left him overwhelmed to the point of numbness. A spike of these self-destructive thoughts would hurl themselves at him and Anthony would have the ability to do absolutely nothing in response but to sit in the tenebrous void of his own mind while his heart palpitated violently, leading to his vision blurring, his surroundings to turn hazy and compact, his limbs feeling immeasurably heavy, blood running through him like slow heavy rivers of mud, and his thoughts would shout ceaselessly and incomprehensibly.

    Anthony would be frozen, and only sometimes would be able to actually act upon these baneful urges and harm himself. The entire weight of existence would somehow manage to grow heavier, more insurmountably confusing and terrible, and all thoughts would overwhelm - this is when Anthony would reach for his desk drawer and pick between loose razor blades, a switchblade, and a stolen box cutter, and slash away at his upper-arm (so as not to go easily noticed). At first, it would start slowly, a surface wound just to draw some blood and feel the pressure and pain of the blade breaking a line into his skin. But during periods of existential panic or uncontrollable hatred towards himself manifesting as irritable, shaking, buzzing rage, he would take the blade and slash rapidly and with much greater force. The wound would open quickly and gush forth blood that would act as a grand release of pressure for Anthony. He would collapse onto his bed and let the blood run onto his sheets and clothes and finally feel perhaps just a brief respite. But even with that relief being more and more fleeting the more he did it, it was always worth it in his mind. And the more this unfolded, the less space he had for new scars on his upper arm - so he moved further and further down. But this was never done as an act to destroy or to bring him closer to his desired death or transformation. It was done to prove to himself that he can feel something else and that, in these desperate and heavy moments, he was in possession of some modicum of control. This was, of course, simply how he rationalized the act to himself. And it would work well enough for perhaps a few minutes or so, enough time to calm him down and provide him with some small satisfaction that came with watching the blood slowly trickle down his arm. But to go further than that? To bring his ubiquitous dreams into reality? He just couldn’t do it. Not yet at least. 

And this was, perhaps ironically, because Anthony truly didn’t want to separate himself from humanity in totality and irrevocably. Despite how much he felt the pull and allure and unshakable desire for suicide, a stronger more resilient part of his psychological makeup kept him alive. It’s likely a commonplace trick the brain pulls on the depressed individual; that being the urge to die and the persistent thought that you were not made to exist among the rest of humanity is merely a way to overpower the more rational, but far more difficult to deal with, issue of wanting somewhere to fit in or someone to belong to. And that’s what Anthony deeply wanted, a place for himself within the human race - the subsection of earth’s inhabitants that Anthony so strongly detested, so strongly wanted a way to rebel against, so strongly wanted to create a dramatic and graphic tableau of himself in rejection of the human form to mock and disgust the rest of humanity, but still, to a much more profound and fundamental degree, wanted to belong to in a tangible, healthy way. 

This feeling, this more powerful, gripping, nigh unobtainable social hunger would, of course, synthesize with the boy’s ever-present sense of dread, suicidal ideation, and severe depression and self-hatred, to only make himself feel more overwhelmed, only more fatalistic, only more doubtful of himself, only more confused, and only more uncomfortable with continuing his existence as a human. And worst of all, this sense of overwhelming dread and a stringent belief that he is and always was and always will be unable to place himself comfortably amongst the living and will never be able to do anything about it lead him to inaction and nigh constant existential panic.

    He lived with these feelings, would become unwillingly intoxicated into immobility and a pervasive waking deadness, and didn’t have the energy or confidence to even make the definitive decision to end his life. Thus, he was governed by his dreams by thoughts but hardly ever in any real, significant action aside from small, non-fatal actions of self-mutilation. His dreams for the end were ultimately futile if he could not commit properly to his own transformation into the void existence of otherness, of becoming a mangled bloodied cretin, of a breathing cicatrix tapestry mocking everything that is classified as “human”. No. Anthony craved death more with each passing hour of each passing day, but still more so wanted a real tangible reason to NOT die. 

But all of this, these tumultuous emotions and dreams of destruction and unwanted desires to belong were a continued prelude to an even greater and unimaginable agony that Anthony was on the unknowing path of experiencing. He would find his place in this world, albeit briefly, before his final and now unwanted destruction by his own hands as well as the one person he found satiated his impossible desire to feel human - even if by the end of it all, perhaps he wasn’t ever human after all. 

---

Victoria Rinaldi:

“Is this it?” thought Victoria, a young girl of about 22 years of age, as she woke up next to a battered, still bleeding corpse of a now maligned love. 

“Are you still there?”

Slowly, her thoughts rushed back to her. Behind her bruised eyes were flashes of The Island of the Dead painting and the skyline full of towering trees, the outline of which burned in her retinas as a fading silhouette. 

Her fingernails, with flecks of flesh underneath, carefully run themselves down the jagged lacerations across her face. They’re swollen and warm, like a wound raised up with infection. One of her eyes, numb and crusted with drying blood, struggles to open. Surroundings still hum and blur. Thoughts and images churn to a fractured start. 

“There needs to be something to fill this silence”, she thought as images of dark, liminal suburban streets with gray sloping roofs, rain falling hard and weighing down her hair, stacks of old books piled up against her mattress, the smell of cigarette smoke rising from shadowy downstairs and soaking into the already yellowish black stained walls all began to surge through the waking and beaten synapses in her head. And then Anthony. 

Anthony and the cuts down his arms, her lips on his keloids, his fingers interwoven in her hair, her eyes in his dreams, beholding the unsettling spectacle of his transformation, their shared fright at what they saw, nights spent dissolving into each other locked away in bedrooms that felt outside of the world, a rock cleaving open his skull. 

His dream as he recounted it to her, the dream that proceeded to ceaselessly invade her sleep. Great screeching monuments etched in primordial stone, the mouth of a cave embedded behind the thick line of trees that seemed to be made of perpetually emulsifying, undulating tar. 

She tries to stand and the world whirls violently around her. 

Images continue, all jumbled and kaleidoscopic. 

He takes her to the real-life epicenter of his nightmares. 

His eyes are flooding out of their sockets, rolling away with the mist escaping from ancient rocks splitting open and howling with impossible life. 

They’re on the street underneath flickering street lamps sharing a cigarette. 

Animals are eating themselves as they turn inside out and melt away with the eclipsing sun. 

She shows him a song, Dazzle by Siouxsie and the Banshees. He tells her he wants to get married to it. She panics.

Clouds descend, fog creeps and spills from the transfixed yelling mouth of the cave. 

“Your teeth when you grin reflecting beams on tombstones.” 

They stroll through a small graveyard in the yard of a Victorian church, graves tilt this way and that, and they try to find their respective birthdays etched in tombstones. Along the way, she falls silent for a while. He doesn’t understand. 

Her skin being torn away and slashed at from what’s become of his hands. 

Go back. He was normal there but scared to death and tried to hide it. 

“Are you still there?”

I’m not me anymore,” the words barely escape from his closing throat. 

He walks her home from visiting her mother in the hospital and lets her be silent for a while. At the diner, they drink from the same coffee cup and sit beside each other, she manages to smile and he lights up. 

His whole body heaves and wretches in the night. He’s pulling his hair out and she can’t stop him. 

His skin is rippling and tearing away from his bones, she puts her hands to her ears but the sounds won’t stop. 

They stand together, hand in hand, staring into the rictus scream of the cave - the confirmation of his dreams, and she tries to believe that she’s enough to help him. He isn’t thinking at all.

The signs of the stars give out one by one and all the birds in the trees rapidly depart or fall dead to the ground so that the two of them became the only two signs of life. 

She wished she could hide in her books, he wished he wasn’t real, they both thought they could help each other. 

But then the cave walls erupted with lightning and they looked into each other’s eyes for the last time. Suddenly, she felt she was the only human left in the world.

He grinned and told her her eyes were dazzling like “a dead sea of fluid mercury.”

She stands over what remains of who she knew as Anthony, closes her eyes, tries to block out the horrible otherworldly squelching and guttural groans coming from this nightmare otherness, and sends the rock down again and again until it stops. 

Already she’s struggling to remember Anthony’s face. 

-

Victoria knew she had to check the body and try to orient herself among this strange hidden city of monstrous carvings and gliding tufts of noxiously colored vapors, all tucked away somewhere secret to the world and eclipsed by great winding hills. But she couldn’t bring herself to move, couldn’t bring herself to check on the body whose ill-colored, pale blood was pooling closer and closer to her. She couldn’t lift up the rock and bring herself to be face-to-face with the squashed, alien-looking bug she crushed and be forced to truly validate the reality of what she had had to do. No, better to stay here lost in flashing images and now poisoned memories.

Perhaps it was a dream? She’s dreamed his dreams before, this would be no different. And Anthony is here too, as he’s just beside her on the small mattress dreaming the same dream and surely worrying about her. He just needs to get up. But he didn’t, there was no waking up.

She didn’t move, some indescribable amount of time passed of her remaining fixed in place in this strange phantasmal grove closed off from everything. Victoria, in these stilted and sludge-like moments, ached for a home or a feeling of home she could return to - she wanted nothing more but what she couldn’t have, what she didn’t really ever have to begin with. She began to feel the unfamiliar yearning for her mother of all people to hold her, to tell her, despite everything, despite the unfathomable horror she’s been thrust into, that everything was going to be okay. That she was loved and protected and was able to be cradled in the comfortable familiarity of a home and a place in which to belong - a safe and permanent escape. She always knew better, she knew that nothing was ever permanent and always felt so horrendously idiotic and childish for all the times she momentarily thought differently. But she couldn’t think so realistically right now, she just wanted something safe and familiar. 

Instead…there was nothing but her, the corpse, and the twisted, distorted faces in the ancient reeking stone whose eyes all seemed to be locked in on the scene - silently mocking Victoria and entrapping her in the horror of it all. Light was escaping behind the trees, she has no idea how much time has passed, and her head throbbed with a pain she has never known. And she missed Anthony - and not the (hopefully) dead thing that was beside her on the stained and shattered forest floor. There was never a point where she could return home - it overwhelmed her, she began to cry as the pocket of the world she was dragged into started to close in and consume her. 

-

(to be continued if I feel like it)